The Facts of Reconstruction

MP3 Audio CD. John Roy Lynch was an African-American Republican statesman, author, lawyer and army officer. Born as a slave in Louisiana, he was freed under the Emancipation Proclamation. His father was an Irish migrant and his parents had a common-law union. After serving for so many years in the state legislature, John was voted as the first African-American Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives; he was the first African-American to maintain this standing in the country. Throughout Reconstruction after the American Civil War, he was one of the first generation of African Americans from the South voted to the United States House of Representatives. Struggled with cumulative restraints in Mississippi, John took up law studies, admitted to the bar, and went back to Washington, DC to practice his legal profession.

After the American Civil War, John, who became a servant in Mississippi, started his profession in politics by first becoming Justice of the Peace, and after as Mississippi State Representative. He was just 26 years of age when he was voted to the United States Congress. There, he persevered to be an activist, presenting numerous bills and defending on those. Probably his best struggle was in the extensive argument advocating the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to prohibit inequity in civic places.

John became the first African American chosen after an emotional address given by Theodore Roosevelt to the designation of Temporary Chairman of the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. Through the Spanish-American War of 1898, he was designated as Treasury Auditor and later as Paymaster under the Republicans. He then started serving with the Regular Army with travels of work in the United States, Cuba and the Philippines.

John stepped down from the Army, and wedded Cora Williams. They lived in Chicago, where he continued his legal profession. He also came to be associated in real estate.